Johnnie Moore: It's time to stand up to ISIS

Johnnie Moore wrote his first book, What Am I Supposed to Do with My Life?, based on his experiences working with college students as vice president of Liberty University. At Liberty, Moore became friends with TV producer Mark Burnett, who asked Moore to move to California to be his chief of staff. We talked about that change in our last conversation together.

But Moore was experiencing another tug on his life—a growing concern for Christians in the Middle East. His most recent book, Defying ISIS, chronicles the threat of the so-called Islamic State militant group to Christians and what we can do about it. We talked about his book last month in New York City.

How did you decide to write a book about ISIS? I believe that God gives you experiences for a reason. About a year before ISIS took over Mosul, Iraq, which was a city that had a Christian population going back almost 2,000 years (now, by the way, there are no Christians left in Mosul) … I happened to be traveling with my mentor, Rick Warren, and we attended a meeting in Jordan that was convened by the king of Jordan. The subject of the meeting was the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. In the meeting were three Catholic cardinals, five orthodox patriarchs and a number of Protestant and evangelical leaders. I sat in the back of that room and I listened as all of these leaders predicted exactly what we’ve seen happen in the Middle East. I just decided that because I knew that was happening, and it appeared that more was going to happen, that I had a responsibility to raise my own voice. I’ve progressively, slowly, and to a greater degree raised my voice over the last year.

You wrote an article for Fox, and it kind of blew up. You’re exactly right. … About February of the next year or so, several months later, I decided, “Okay, it’s time for me to speak up,” and I just wrote an article, like I had written many articles before. The title of it was “We must stand up for the Middle East’s persecuted Christians.” It was published on Fox News, and within 24 or 48 hours, it exploded. It was read more than any of the articles that were written by any of the principals in that meeting. I viewed it as a call. God was giving me a responsibility. I had to become a part of this on a greater level, and within days I started getting phone calls from congressmen and think tanks and Christian leaders from around the world, and emails, both thanking me for raising my voice but also asking me to join various efforts.

I never thought I would travel to Iraq, and I never thought I would write a book on ISIS, and I surely never thought I’d be sitting in New York City going from news show to news show and think tank to think tank as an expert on ISIS. But I think compassion means action. It’s not enough to care. If you care, you have to act, and acting begins with educating yourself and then deciding to do something that will actually move the needle. You’ve got to speak up and you’ve got to make a difference.

Tell me about the book. It’s really a book of stories, isn’t it? I’ve been to Jordan many, many times and had gone to the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan going all the way back to the very beginning of the Syrian conflict. It’s not that I didn’t know anything. One night, I was having dinner with, oddly enough, the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors in Beverly Hills. I went back home from that dinner, and I opened up my inbox, where I found an email with the subject line, “Awaiting Death.” It was from a pastor in Syria, and he was describing in that email, in live form, like a live reporter, the mortars hitting the buildings around him and then hitting his house. He wrote in that letter, “I don’t know what to do. I hear screaming everywhere. It’s dark now. Should I run outside? Should I stay in my bed and die?” It was like the diary of Anne Frank or something.

When I read that email, I had this moment where it’s like, “Okay, I got to go.” Within a month, I was in Iraq, and I was traveling around. … I met with Christians and Yazidis … and Muslims. I went from place to place, and I heard the same thing over and over again. From Christian brothers and sisters I heard, “We feel forgotten. When are you going to pay attention to our genocide?” I heard one Iraqi nun who’s taking care of thousands of people, Christians, Muslims, everybody else, Yazidis. … She told me, she said, “I lived in America. You’re wonderful people. I have an education from an American college. I love America, but I don’t understand why you won’t help your Christian brothers and sisters.” She said to me, “You take such good care of your pets. Why won’t you take care of us?”

That’s when I decided I had to tell these people’s stories, and so I decided I would write a book, and the book became, Defying ISIS. It’s not a fun book to read. It’s a hard book to read. It demonstrates in exact terms the brutality and the threat of this evil organization that aims to do both here and there something that will wipe Christianity off the face of the earth if they have the opportunity. And I’m determined to stop it.

For an American not familiar with this part of the world or with these issues, it becomes overwhelming pretty quickly. Is that part of the problem? Yeah, and it’s a part of why I wrote the book. … People didn’t believe what they were hearing. They just thought it was too brutal, and so I wanted a well-documented account.

When these stories started coming out, especially when they were not coming out from the mainstream media outlets, they were just hard to believe. It’s the 21st century. You don’t behead people and sell women as slaves. … [But] in Mosul, on the slave market, the price lists for the slaves categorize the slaves by age and by religion. A 1- to 9-year-old slave, a little girl, that was Christian or Yazidi cost $170, and the price of the Christian slaves alone ought to just drive us to madness. It ought to compel us to do whatever it takes to raise awareness about this issue and help these people. The fact is that’s just one of the awful things in the region.

I have become under more and more personal conviction, which I actually believe is a call from God Himself, that I need to do more, to speak up more and to work harder on behalf of these people, to do what the Bible tells us we should do. It says in Hebrews 13:3, “Remember those who are in prison and pray for them as if you were there with them.” The stories from Iraq and Syria and the stories of the hands of ISIS in those countries and in other countries ought to compel us in a deep, deep way to do whatever it takes to stop this madness and to help those in harm’s way.

How do you think the American church should respond to the threat of ISIS? The honest truth is, if we look at ourselves in the mirror, the church has been far more silent than the church could have been and the church should have been on this crisis. That’s changing a bit now, but it’s not changing fast enough. This isn’t the time for a once-in-52-week-a-year Persecution Sunday. This is the time for every single time a church’s doors are open, every single time someone intersects with our faith in this country and in any country of the world right now, this is the time we pray with the same intensity as this crisis. It’s a fact. This is a once-in-a-thousand-year crisis. Christian communities that survived Genghis Khan are facing the threat of eradication in the 21st century. This is a time for preachers to act like prophets and not just teachers.

In fact, as you and I are sitting here in New York, we had to interrupt this conversation because you had to take a call that really talked about an unfolding situation that was good news. Can you share what just happened? Here’s what happened. There’s this nun. Her name is Sister Diana, and she’s currently displaced in Northern Iraq, in Erbil. It’s the second time she’s been displaced. She lived in Mosul until terrorists blew up her convent in 2009, and she had to move to Qaraqosh, which is an ancient Christian city in Iraq.

Then late last summer ISIS attacked Qaraqosh and emptied out that city of 50,000 Christians, so it was the second time she’s displaced. She’s living in Erbil as a displaced Christian, having seen all this brutality, nearly losing her own life and the lives of those she serves with. So we were trying to bring her to the United States at the invitation of Congress and to testify, as well as to be on the media. … She’s Mother Teresa, for goodness sakes. By the way, she had letters of endorsement from Democrats and Republicans to major, nonpartisan NGOs. This is like a rubber stamp type of situation. But she goes into the consulate in Erbil, and her visa is denied. They denied her visa. When we got word of this, which was incomprehensible to us, we started raising our voices, and thousands of people all over the country, all around America, started raising their voices. Senators and congressman started putting pressure on the State Department and others. After a lot of work and a lot of screaming, in the middle of this interview, I was able to verify that Sister Diana received her visa to come testify to Congress. On one level, I’m over the moon. I’m overjoyed by this news, but on another level I think it’s absolutely incomprehensible that we had to rally thousands of people for such a sensible and simple thing.

I think a lot of people in the United States are still having trouble wrapping their heads around the whole situation. Is ISIS really a threat to Christians here in the United States? From the very beginning, we’ve underestimated ISIS. While we’re talking right now, ISIS controls one contiguous piece of land that’s larger than the UK, between Iraq and Syria. They, in effect, control Libya. They, in effect, control the northeast of Nigeria. While they don’t control Somalia, al-Shabaab is learning tactics from ISIS and is basically the same thing. They’ve committed significant acts of terrorism in Egypt and Kenya and, by the way, in Europe and, by the way, in the United States of America through ISIS sympathizers. … Major European universities studied Arabic language tweets in the United States that referenced ISIS, and one out of five of them last fall was in support of ISIS. Even when you control that for spam and other things like that, it’s a significant number. It’s a scary, scary number. …

The fact is that if you live in the West, from an ISIS perspective, you’re considered a Christian. You’re part of the crusaders. That’s what you are. We see what ISIS does to Christians. In fact, the front page of the ISIS magazine in October was St. Peter’s Square with an ISIS flag superimposed atop the obelisk.

The beheadings of the Coptics and the Ethiopians, the execution of the Ethiopians, the videos were entitled, “A Message to the Nation of the Cross.” ISIS, they’re killing lots of people. They’ve killed more Muslims than anyone else. They’ve targeting Yazidis and everyone else, but their war against Christians is not tertiary. It’s not part of the plan. It’s the centerpiece of it. I’ll say it again. We deal with it there, or we face it here.

Listen to Warren Smith’s full conversation with Johnnie Moore on Listening In.